Stanford Pupper: A Low-Cost Agile Quadruped Robot for Benchmarking and Education

TL;DR

Stanford Pupper is an affordable, easily assembled open-source quadruped robot designed for benchmarking and education, enabling standardized testing of legged robot control methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces Stanford Pupper, a low-cost, open-source quadruped platform with standardized benchmarks for locomotion and robustness, facilitating research and education.

Findings

Pupper can be built in under 8 hours for under $2000.

Two benchmarks, Sprint and Scramble, evaluate speed and terrain robustness.

A baseline controller with dynamic gaits is provided for comparison.

Abstract

We present Stanford Pupper, an easily-replicated open source quadruped robot designed specifically as a benchmark platform for legged robotics research. The robot features torque-controllable brushless motors with high specific power that enable testing of impedance and torque-based machine learning and optimization control approaches. Pupper can be built from the ground up in under 8 hours for a total cost under $2000, with all components either easily purchased or 3D printed. To rigorously compare control approaches, we introduce two benchmarks, Sprint and Scramble with a leader board maintained by Stanford Student Robotics. These benchmarks test high-speed dynamic locomotion capability, and robustness to unstructured terrain. We provide a reference controller with dynamic, omnidirectional gaits that serves as a baseline for comparison. Reproducibility is demonstrated across multiple institutions with robots made independently. All material is available at https://stanfordstudentrobotics.org/quadruped-benchmark.